AUGUST 1, 2002

What a lot of twaddle...

The Formula 1 circus is on holiday this week but the many websites connected with the sport have felt the need to keep producing news not seemingly worried as to whether or not there is any logic to any of it. This started out with Mark Webber signing for Jaguar and has since moved on to other stories which are even less likely to ever come true.

However the latest rumors are beyond even that and an indication that people are beginning to get desperate. Minardi is planning a deal for Ferrari engines next year and Alain Prost is making an F1 comeback as a consultant.

Minardi would probably quite like to have Ferrari engines but there is the small matter of money. Ferrari engines are the most expensive customer engines available and while the old price of around $25m has come down, it is not in the same league as deals currently being discussed by Cosworth Racing. Given that Minardi has not been paying for engines this year and has struggled to get to its budget means that if a Ferrari deal is in the offing the team must have found a sponsorship deal worth at least $35m and those deals are not even being found by the top teams these days. Anyone with that much money could buy a team.

The idea that Alain Prost is going to make an F1 comeback as a consultant is similarly ludicrous. Prost has proved most emphatically that racing drivers do not make great team owners and the idea that someone would pay him money to tell them how to run racing teams does not hold water. Prost's future appears to be as a team owner in sportscar racing with some old factory Audis.